"there are immaturities, but there are immensities"- from Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake

Thursday, June 14, 2012

THEY BURN SO BRIGHT WHILST YOU CAN ONLY WONDER WHY: WATCHING
FIORRUCI MADE ME HARDCORE

text for the Mark Leckey retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery, 2001

by Simon Reynolds

There are a number of angles from which you could watch Mark
Leckey's extraordinary Fiorucci Made Me
Hardcore. There's the anthropological view, which would see the footage of
U.K. dance scenes as not so much subcultures as cults: upsurges of the
sacred within an otherwise brutally disenchanted and secularized
post-industrial Britain, mystical youth tribes each organized around an array
of fetishes, totems and rites. Such an analysis might zoom in on the parallels
between Sufi whirling dervishes and the twirling dancers at Northern Soul
temple Wigan Casino: the same defiance of gravity and weightless levitation
above the mundane. Or it might note the messianic fervour of sayings like
Northern Soul's "Keep the Faith" or rave's "Hardcore Will Never
Die".

Another potential
prism for Fiorucci is subcultural
theory, the Marxism-influenced school of "resistance through rituals"
research that emerged in Britain during the 1970s. Here the focus would less be
on transcendence than on what was being transcended: the alchemical synergy of style, music and
drugs as a "solution" to the
impasses of the class system, a jamming of symbolic codes that achieved a kind
of victory over the fate otherwise laid out for these working class youths, while at the same
time diverting them from pursuing a real and permanent solution to their
problems through political activity.

Other readings could draw draw on more recent and trendier
theories. For instance, a

Lacan/Kristeva/Bataille
analysis that would be more, well, analytic, in the Freudian sense, drawing on on notions like "drive" and the
"acephalic" in order to draw out the elements of repetition and
regression in these drugs-and-dance cults, with their fixated trances and autistic-seeming
bodily movements of rocking, shaking and twitching. Or perhaps a cybernetic approach, influenced
equally by Deleuze & Guattari, Brian Eno, and Kodwo Eshun, and examining these subcultures in terms of
machinic energy, the feedback loops of "scenius", the generation of
posthuman intensities, and so forth.

All these angles have
their strengths and virtues; all make
visible certain aspects of Northern Soul, the Casuals, and Hardcore Rave (the
three separate but linked subcultures that Fiorucci
works with) while inevitably obscuring others. My own reading would probably touch on all
of these already mentioned at various points but would betray a pronounced
slant towards paradox, looking at the
way these cults are dedicated to beauty and elegance yet so often produce
grotesquerie and indignity, or at how these movements based around perpetual
motion seem to find their truest essence in moments of stasis, frozen poses,
tableaux. I expect that I would find myself drawn irresistibly towards
oxymoronic formulations: the dance
subculture as an exit that becomes a dead end,
offering transcendence that turns into a trap, achieving a triumph that
is simultaneously a form of defeat. And so forth...

But there's something a little too neat and tidy about these
formulations... a faint taint of
smugness, which may well be unavoidable but still feels inadequate. All these different ways of dissecting/contextualizing/
historicizing the strange subcultural blooms of a Britain that has disappeared never
to return.... all of them, however well-intended, serve ultimately to explain away and domesticate these unassimilable phenomena. In so
far as they successfully translate these cults into other terms (the
jargons of particular discourses and disciplines) such readings deflect you
from the singular power of Leckey's artwork: its reality, the fact that it is
made almost entirely of salvaged documentary footage. Now obviously the material has been processed:
it's been selected out of a much larger
mass, it's been juxtaposed and sequenced and altered in various ways (mostly within the
domain of time and speed--slowing down, freeze-framing). The footage fragments
have also been severed from whatever original audio track they possessed and
given a new one (a remarkable piece of sound art in its own right). But despite this working up of the material,
in a certain crucial way the ultimate effect is of an artist who doesn't get in
the way of the raw material, out of respect.
What comes across, overwhelmingly, is the palpable reality of what you
are looking at, in all its absurdity, monstrosity and glory. There is an opacity to the found material, an
insistent but mute materiality: limb-dislocating contortions, foetus-pale
flesh, eyes vacant in trance or stiletto-sharp with vigilant pride, maniacal smiles that split apart the dead grey
mask of English "mustn't
grumble" mundanity, faces
disfigured with bliss...

At times, the sensation of watching Fiorucci borders on
invasive: obscene not in the porno sense (staged, graphic, every detail exposed
by the bright light) but obscene as in the more murky and partial view of the
peeping tom or eavesdropper. It can
feel, at times, a little like what looking at videos covertly taken of people
masturbating might look like: their expressions and sounds and fantasy murmurings. You sometimes think: this should really never
have been filmed, these moments should really never have been captured, these
are secrets that should really never have been shown.

Because all this really happened. This is how some young people actually spent their time, this
is the thing to which they devoted all their
energy and money and passion and life-force. Mark Leckey has pieced together a kind of
shrine made up of sacred relics, fragments of nights that the participants may
barely remember. Image debris from a
time in their lives that they might conceivably regret, for any number of
reasons, or, perhaps worse, might regret because that time is long gone, is passed
and past.

What you are witnessing--what Mark
Leckey is re-presenting here almost without comment-- is a collection of what
may have been the best moments from a number of young British lives in the last
three decades of the 20th Century. Their
finest hour.

Monday, June 11, 2012

JAMES BROWN, StartimeMelody Maker, June 15th 1991

by Simon Reynolds

This
four-CD mega-anthology reveals that there are actually two James
Browns. The first is JB the patrician and patriarch: the disciplinarian
who fined his musicians for the most miniscule misdemeanors; the black
Statesman whose august presence could quell a ghetto riot; the black
capitalist who monitored every last minutiae of his business affairs;
the righteous role model with his anti-drug, pro-education songs ('King
Heroin', 'Don't Be A Drop-Out'). This "hardest working man in
showbiz"/"Say it Loud I'm Black And I'm Proud" JB is possibly the single
biggest factor behind that particularly white/male version of soul that
sees it as the music of spiritual fortitude. I recall one NME soulboy
scribe declaring (having just slagged off some 'decadent' Goth group)
that if he ever got to be Prime Minister, he'd make it compulsory for
schoolkids to listen to JB for 3 hours a day, so that they could learn
all about pride, passion and dignity. Totalitarian of passion, or what?!

But
there's another JB that's worth digging through the R&B Reaganisms
to recover: the JB that wasn't about being a control freak, but about
freaked-out loss-of-control, voodoo possession, delirium, enslavement by
the rhythm. The first disc, Mr. Dynamite, is unsalvageably
antiquated, all huff'n'puff, horn vamps, hoary old showbiz dynamics. But
from about 1966's "Bring It Up" onwards, Brown's music gets
progressively more African and 'avant-garde': songs devolve into closed
grooves, minimal, mantric, mind-exterminating and interminable. 'Cold
Sweat' remains the definitive JB title, capturing the frigid
feverishness of the sound. Tracks like 'I Can't Stand Myself (When You
Touch Me)' and 'Ain't It Funky Now' are coition-combustion engines,
"desiring machines", offering a stern, oppressive, exhausting brand of
bliss.

On Seventies trax like 'Funky Drummer', 'Sex Machine',
'Superbad', 'I Got Ants In My Pants', 'Doing It To Death' and 'Hot' (the
basis of Bowie's 'Fame'), almost every other guitar tic, bass
palpitation and drum lick sounds déjà vu. But that's because
they've been sampled by a thousand rap groups. If JB and Kraftwerk were
the twin godfathers of hip hop, it's because there's an affinity between
the coldblooded Teutonic technocrats and the fiery human volcano that
would scandalize many a soulboy: a certain arid, clinical, maniacal
precision of sound. Afrika Bambaata understood the 'Man Machine'/'Sex
Machine' connection; that's why the Pharoah Of Electro persuaded the
King Of Soul to collaborate on the 1984 single 'Unity'.

Madness, machismo, magnificent monotony: get up, get into it, and get involved.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

MOON WIRING CLUB

An Audience of Art
Deco Eyes

Gecophonic

(The Wire, 2007)

by Simon Reynolds

It's always a tricky moment when a genre achieves
definition--its constellation of reference points mapped out, its repertoire of
tricks codified. For that's when being "generic" becomes a possibility.
Then again, if a genre's got a lot going for it, what exactly is the
problem? The bustle of new recruits just
adds to the excitement, as everyone from doom metal fiends to free folk freaks
can attest. The more, the merrier.

Or in the case of Moon Wiring Club, "the more, the
spookier"--the genre in question being hauntology. Ian Hodgson,
the figure behind MWC, is no bandwagon-hopping neophyte, however. Despite
the uncanny parallels with Ghost Box--not just shared preoccupations with horror, children's television, wyrd pastoralism, maverick electronics, but
the creatin of a Belbury-like imaginary town called Clinkskell--Hodgson has
been exploring this area for several years. An
Audience of Deco Eyes, MWC's debut, evolved out of what was originally intended
to be "a peculiar children's book," Strange Reports from a Northern Village.

Like Ghost Box and Mordant Music, MWC utilizes a lot of
library music and pulp soundtrack motifs. But the music's construction and feel
is more beat-driven and loop-based:. Certain tracks suggest trip hop if
its sample-palette didn't draw on jazz but the incidental music in The Prisoner. "Mademoiselle Marionette" could
almost rock a dancefloor, while the reverbed-bass pulse of "Roger's
Ghost" recalls 23 Skidoo's blend of dank industrial and hot funk.
Alongside these kinetic tracks, there's midtempo contraptions-gone-awry like
"The Edwardians Begin to Enjoy Themselves" and gaseous ambience like
"Ghost Radio" and "Underground Library". Crusty English
voices limn the album, warning about "the treacherous elm" or
offering the decimalization-era apology "I've only got… old money".
But rather than mere quirky quaintness, the atmosphere conjured is a
morbid malaise redolent of Peeping Tom or The Servant, the
sense of something grotesque and corrupt lurking within the shrubbery, behind
the curtained French windows. With its fidgety intricacy and slow-panning
stereophony, Hodgson's audio-montage and sound-design is immaculate throughout,
making Art Deco Eyes a bewitching and genuinely disquieting
listen.

MOON WIRING CLUB / CAFE KAPUT

The Guardian, Nov 24, 2010

by Simon Reynolds

"One
thing I've always wanted for my music is for it to appeal to children,"
says Ian Hodgson of Moon Wiring Club. "An ideal listening situation would be a
family car journey. I think children would like all the voices and oddness. If you present kids with fun spooky
electronic music, then they might grow up wanting to make it themselves, like I
did with Radiophonic Workshop." Hodgson's friend and collaborator Jon Brooks,
a/k/a The Advisory Circle, goes one better with the debut release for his label
Café Kaput, which consists of spooky electronic music actually made by schoolchildren in the 1970s.

Brooks
and Hodgson originally met through MySpace.
They discovered that they were
"variations
of the same person," according to Hodgson, with a shared passion for
vintage Seventies and Eighties TV, not just programmes but the musical
soundtracks. Sticking with the scaring kids theme, one particular obsession they
share is the Public Information Film--those well-meant but disturbing short
films shown on TV in the 1970s to warn children of the dangers of electrical
substations or playing on farms. On The Advisory Circle's 2008 album Other
Channels, Brooks even created some fake ones, "Frozen Ponds PIF" and
"Civil Defense Is Common Sense".

The
friendship quickly became an alliance. Brooks has done the mastering for all
four of the Moon Wiring Club albums, including the brand-new one A Spare Tabby
at The Cat's Wedding, probably Hodgson's best yet. Hodgson, in turn, is doing all the
artwork for Café Kaput and designed the label's logo. A full-blown
collaboration between Moon Wiring Club and The Advisory Circle is in the
pipeline.

The
pair are chalk and cheese, though, when it comes to the way they operate
musically. A
skilled multi-instrumentalist whose music is "98%
hand-played", Brooks
makes little use of sampling or computer software. Other Channels and his
earlier Advisory Circle release Mind How You Go (reissued this year in expanded,
vinyl-only form) revealed Brooks to be one of the contemporary scene's great
melodists, with a gift for plush, detailed arrangements. Hodgson's approach, in contrast, is much
more hip hop raw. Entirely sample-based,
Moon Wiring Club is put together using astonishingly rudimentary technology: Playstation 2 and "a second-hand
copy of MTV Music Generator 2 from 2001".

Hodgson
turned to this crude set-up after struggling with the software typically used
to make electronic dance music. Because he's a long-time games fiend, Hodgson
found using a joypad to make music "much faster and more enjoyable"
than clicking a mouse. But it took him a
while to work out how to get good results out of Playstation 2. "After
months of tinkering, I discovered that it's very good at sequencing short
repeated phrases." Instead of looping breakbeats, Hodgson builds up rhythm
patterns from single drum hits. Through these wonky beats he then weaves
intricate, often heavily echoed basslines. "I'll place the bass melody
around the rhythm in a very 'stereo' way. I tend to see it all in my head as a
'cat's cradle'. Then if you add delay to the bass and time it right you get
extra little melodies inside this structure... They sort of bounce and react with each other.
Add melody/atmospheres to it and you get another interlocking structure--slightly
organic, soggy, bouncy and knackered."

The
Moon Wiring Club sound is a bit like trip hop if its "vibe" was
sourced not in obscure funk and jazz-fusion records but from the incidental music
to The Prisoner, Doctor Who, and The Flumps.
Vocal samples are a huge part of Moon Wiring Club. Always spoken not
sung, always English in origin, they're derived
largely from videos and DVDs of long-lost U.K. television shows like Casting
the Runes, Raffles, and Ace of Wands. A scholar of "vintage telly",
Hodgson can discourse at persuasive length about the superiority of British theatrical-turned-TV thespians like
Julian Glover and Jan Francis over American actors like Harrison Fords or Mary
Louise Parkers. He recently dedicated a podcast mix to Seventies voice-over
deity and Quiller star Michael Jayston.

Moon
Wiring Club originally evolved out of what was intended to be
"a peculiar children's book, Strange Reports from a Northern Village."
That project stalled but it did spawn the Blank Workshop website, centered around
an imaginary town called Clinksell, which has its own brand of confectionery
(Scrumptyton Sweets) and line of fantasy fiction (Moontime Books) . It lives on also in the distinctive graphic
look that Hodgson, a former Fine Art student, wraps around the Moon Wiring Club
releases, drawing on influences like Biba's 1920s-into-1970s glamour and the strange
exquisiteness of Arthur Rackham's illustrations and Victorian Fairy painters such
as Richard Dadd. Moon Wiring Club and Blank Workshop is where all Hodgson's
enthusiasms and obsessions converge: "electronic music, Art Deco, and the
England of teashops, stately homes, ruined buildings and weird magic." And
computer games music. "There is something about the forced
repetition that makes you remember the tunes in a unique way," Hodgson
says, adding that in a certain way "Moon Wiring Club is meant to be
Edwardian computer game music."

"Still a kid
in lots of ways" is how Jon Brooks describes himself. His own journey
through music began "at pre-school
age", thanks to his jazz session-musician father. "Fellow jazzers would come round to
record demos or share ideas, and there were always instruments and tape
recorders lying about. " Brooks was proficient on a half-size drum kit his
dad bought before he even went to infant school. Soon the child prodigy was
grappling with guitar, glockenspiel, and keyboards, and messing with tape
recorders. Although his father died when
Brooks was only nine, he continued to pursue music, avoiding any formal
training but studying music technology and also helping out with the teaching
of an A-level class in music0tech.

Perhaps
his early start with music, along with
his later involvement in musical
pedagogy, accounts for why Brooks was so
intrigued by Electronic Music in the Classroom, an ultra-rare recording that was the byproduct
of a course implemented at several Home Counties schools in 1975/76 and which
he has reissued through his just-launched downloads-only label Café Kaput. Originally
released in a miniscule edition of reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes for the
parents of the children involved, the record is credited to D.D. Denham, the
peripatetic teacher who devised and implemented the course. But the contents are actually the crème de la
crème of the work created by participating children. Now retired, Denham
stresses that "the concepts were
always those of the child. I would help quite a bit with technical realisation,
in terms of connecting that concept to a sound. But I always explained to them
the steps taken in order to achieve the sound.
The children soon picked up various techniques and developed them on
their own. So, a little bit of collaboration, but it was more guidance than
anything."

Many
of the pieces on Electronic Music in the Classroom are disorienting and
disquieting, reflecting children's under-acknowledged appetite for the
sinister. "Some children would get very spooked by each other's
compositions, or sounds," Denham recalls. "Sometimes an oscillator
would emit a loud wailing sound and lots of the other children would gather
round the instrument like a magnet, rather than run away. Kids actually love
being scared and sound, although harmless in this case, can be scary and
thrilling!" The reissue comes with the original liner notes, in which
Denham recounts some of the quirky inspirations and back stories that the
children came up with, from a recurring nightmare about nuns, to the unsettling
smell of the air expelled from the church organ, to the ghostly flitting
figures of poachers seen from afar after
dusk .

Then
there's "The Way The Vicar Smiles", a delirium of drastically
warped, vaguely ecclesiastical sounds
(what could be church bells, a choir singing psalms, and so forth). In the liner notes, "Vicar Smiles"
is accurately described its young creators Robert and Luke as "a bit
creepy". "With the benefit of
hindsight, the LEA thought we were probably skating a little too close to the
middle with that one," recalls Denham. "You couldn't get away with it
now. However, the vicar in question disappeared from his work a couple of years
later, without so much as a whisper. Make of that what you will."